Thursday, February 15, 2018

Reading List: The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

After becoming prime minister in May 1940, one of Winston Churchill's
first acts was to establish the
Special
Operations Executive (SOE), which was intended to conduct
raids, sabotage, reconnaissance, and support resistance
movements in Axis-occupied countries. The SOE was not part
of the military: it was a branch of the Ministry of Economic
Warfare and its very existence was a state secret, camouflaged
under the name “Inter-Service Research Bureau”.
Its charter was, as Churchill described it, to “set Europe
ablaze”.

The SOE consisted, from its chief, Brigadier Colin McVean Gubbins,
who went by the designation “M”, to its recruits, of
people who did not fit well with the regimentation, hierarchy,
and constraints of life in the conventional military branches.
They could, in many cases, be easily mistaken for blackguards,
desperadoes, and pirates, and that's precisely what they were
in the eyes of the enemy—unconstrained by the rules of
warfare, striking by stealth, and sowing chaos, mayhem, and terror
among occupation troops who thought they were far from the front.

Leading some of the SOE's early exploits was
Gustavus
“Gus” March-Phillipps, founder of the
British Army's
Small
Scale Raiding Force, and given the SOE designation
“Agent W.01”, meaning the first agent assigned
to the west Africa territory with the leading zero
identifying him as “trained and licensed to use all
means to liquidate the enemy”—a license to kill.
The SOE's liaison with the British Navy, tasked with obtaining
support for its operations and providing cover stories for
them, was a fellow named
Ian Fleming.

One of the SOE's first and most daring exploits was
Operation
Postmaster, with the goal of seizing German and
Italian ships anchored in the port of Santa Isabel
on the Spanish island colony of
Fernando Po
off the coast of west Africa. Given the green light by
Churchill over the strenuous objections of the Foreign Office
and Admiralty, who were concerned about the repercussions if
British involvement in what amounted to an act of piracy in a
neutral country were to be disclosed, the operation was mounted
under the strictest secrecy and deniability, with a cover story
prepared by Ian Fleming. Despite harrowing misadventures along
the way, the plan was a brilliant success, capturing
three ships and their crews and delivering them to the
British-controlled port of Lagos without any casualties.
Vindicated by the success, Churchill gave the SOE the green
light to raid Nazi occupation forces on the Channel Islands
and the coast of France.

On his first mission in Operation Postmaster was
Anders Lassen,
an aristocratic Dane who enlisted as a private in the
British
Commandos after his country was occupied by the Nazis.
With his silver-blond hair, blue eyes, and accent easily mistaken
for German, Lassen was apprehended by the Home Guard on several
occasions while on training missions in Britain and held as
a suspected German spy until his commanders intervened.
Lassen was given a field commission, direct from private to
second lieutenant, immediately after Operation Postmaster, and
went on to become one of the most successful leaders of special
operations raids in the war. As long as Nazis occupied his
Danish homeland, he was possessed with a desire to kill as many
Nazis as possible, wherever and however he could, and when in
combat was animated by a berserker drive and ability to improvise
that caused those who served with him to call him the
“Danish Viking”.

This book provides a look into the operations of the SOE
and its successor organisations, the
Special
Air Service and
Special
Boat Service, seen through the career of Anders
Lassen. So numerous were special operations, conducted in
many theatres around the world, that this kind of focus
is necessary. Also, attrition in these high-risk raids,
often far behind enemy lines, was so high there are few
individuals one can follow throughout the war. As the war
approached its conclusion, Lassen was the only surviving
participant in Operation Postmaster, the SOE's first raid.

Lassen went on to lead raids against Nazi occupation troops
in the Channel Islands, leading Churchill to remark, “There
comes from the sea from time to time a hand of steel which
plucks the German sentries from their posts with growing
efficiency.” While these “butcher-and-bolt”
raids could not liberate territory, they yielded prisoners,
code books, and radio contact information valuable to
military intelligence and, more importantly, forced the Germans
to strengthen their garrisons in these previously thought secure
posts, tying down forces which could otherwise be sent to active
combat fronts. Churchill believed that the enemy should be
attacked wherever possible, and SOE was a precision weapon which
could be deployed where conventional military forces could not
be used.

As the SOE was absorbed into the military Special Air Service, Lassen
would go on to fight in North Africa, Crete, the Aegean islands,
then occupied by Italian and German troops, and mainland Greece.
His raid on a German airbase on occupied Crete took out fighters
and bombers which could have opposed the Allied landings in Sicily.
Later, his small group of raiders, unsupported by any other force,
liberated the Greek city of Salonika, bluffing the German commander
into believing Lassen's forty raiders and two fishing boats were actually
a British corps of thirty thousand men, with armour, artillery, and
naval support.

After years of raiding in peripheral theatres, Lassen hungered
to get into the “big war”, and ended up in Italy,
where his irregular form of warfare and disdain for military
discipline created friction with his superiors. But he got
results, and his unit was tasked with reconnaissance and
pathfinding for an Allied crossing of Lake Comacchio (actually,
more of a swamp) in
Operation
Roast in the final days of the war. It was there he was
to meet his end, in a fierce engagement against Nazi troops
defending the north shore. For this, he posthumously received
the Victoria Cross, becoming the only non-Commonwealth citizen
so honoured in World War II.

It is a cliché to say that a work of history “reads
like a thriller”, but in this case it is completely
accurate. The description of the raid on the
Kastelli
airbase on Crete would, if made into a movie, probably
cause many viewers to suspect it to be fictionalised, but
that's what really happened, based upon after action reports by
multiple participants and aerial reconnaissance after the fact.

World War II was a global conflict, and while histories often
focus on grand battles such as D-day, Stalingrad, Iwo Jima, and
the fall of Berlin, there was heroism in obscure places such
as the Greek islands which also contributed to the victory,
and combatants operating in the shadows behind enemy lines who
did their part and often paid the price for the risks they
willingly undertook. This is a stirring story of this shadow
war, told through the short life of one of its heroes.